Strange: Amazing! Berry’s next feat?

“Best” is a big word. It’s absolute, to be used only with the utmost discrimination.

With that standard in mind, I hesitate to say definitively who is the best football player I’ve seen in 25 years covering Tennessee.

I don’t hesitate to say this: Eric Berry is becoming harder to refute.

“He’s amazing,’’ UT head coach Phillip Fulmer said Sunday night in what has become a weekly assessment of his sophomore defensive back.

“He’s maybe a Dale Carter kind of guy,’’ Fulmer said, trying to conjure up another great DB. “But when you put him in the category of players here at other positions, he’s in the Peyton Manning or Jamal Lewis type of category. He’s just a fantastic football player.’’

At Tennessee there is no category higher than the Peyton Manning category.

Manning is one of UT’s four Heisman Trophy runners-up. He, Doug Atkins and Reggie White have their numbers retired.

Of those three, Manning was the only one I covered. I’d certainly put him on my short list of best UT football players, along with Carter, Heath Shuler, Carl Pickens, Al Wilson and John Henderson.

Then there’s Berry, rising with a bullet.

You know the headlines. Saturday night he broke the SEC record for career interception return yards. Ten career interceptions, 397 career return yards. (That doesn’t count a 52-yard fumble return last year.)

Some career. He’s played a whopping 21 games.

The record Berry broke, set by Bobby Wilson of Ole Miss, had stood for 59 years. (Wilson later coached baseball at Carson-Newman for nearly 30 years.)

The next record Berry will break is the NCAA record for career return yardage: 501, by Terrell Buckley of Florida State 1989-91. Go ahead, mark it down.

Berry is the complete package. He tackles like a jaguar on a deer. But it’s his interceptions, and what he does after, that is most remarkable.

His first was spectacular, returning a Tim Tebow pass 96 yards for a touchdown in 2007. Later that year, Berry had two picks against Arkansas for a combined 98 yards.

In the past three games, Berry has been expanding his range: 48 yards against Northern Illinois, 54 against Georgia and then 72 for a touchdown against Mississippi State.

Fulmer acknowledged Sunday it’s getting tougher to ignore the benefits to be derived from using Berry on offense or kick returns. He was, after all, a high school quarterback.

“The problem is time,’’ Fulmer said, meaning practice. “You start getting ready for an offense, particularly one like Alabama, and it’s hard to take him off (defense) to work on those things.’’

If Berry never plays a snap of offense or returns a kick, he’ll still be electrifying to watch. On that count, it’s too bad Tennessee’s season tanked so early. Berry deserves to have a nation watching.

If he stays healthy, he will also deserve to be consensus first-team All-America, regardless of Tennessee’s fate.

If he finishes the season the way he’s started he’ll be a worthy candidate for the Jim Thorpe Award, given to the nation’s top defensive back.

And here’s one more “if’’ to consider, albeit a wild and crazy one.

If Berry were to return a few kicks and see what he could do with the ball in his hands on offense, would any Heisman Trophy voters take note?

They noticed Charles Woodson in 1997. Woodson had eight interceptions that year for a combined seven return yards. Seven.

Berry’s had 174 yards the past three weeks. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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